Furiously Happy (17 page)

Did you just break into an essay in the middle of our interview?

I did. Sorry. But you're the interviewer so technically it's your fault for not reining me in.

Sure. Blame the victim. I don't have depression but I've seen you struggle with it. What advice do you have for people who are currently looking for help?

Every mental illness is different because every person is different. There aren't any easy cures but there are so many tools available now that people are finally starting to talk about it. You have to figure out how to
survive
depression, which is really not easy because when you're depressed you're more exhausted than you've ever been in your life and your brain is lying to you and you feel unworthy of the time and energy (which you often don't even have) needed to get help. That's why you have to rely on friends and family and strangers to help you when you can't help yourself.

Lots of people think that they're a failure if their first or second or eighth cure for depression or anxiety doesn't work the way they wanted. But an illness is an illness. It's not your fault if the medication or therapy you're given to treat your mental illness doesn't work perfectly, or it worked for a while but then stopped working. You aren't a math problem.
You're a person.
What works for you won't always work for me (and vice versa) but I do believe that there's a treatment out there for everyone if you give yourself the time and patience to find it.

Additionally, psychiatrists are always changing shit, so even they don't know exactly what's going on. A mental disorder might be reclassified into a phobia. A phobia might be reclassified as a disorder. In fact, I asked my shrink to read this book and fix everything that's now outdated but it'll just be outdated again next week when
The Big Book of Crazy
is updated again. She agreed that it's hard to keep up with it all but pointed out that it's called
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
. In my defense, I'm bored with that name and I think they'd sell more copies if they used my title. Or maybe
Game of Thrones, Part 14.

Here's what I find helpful: Sunlight, antidepressants, and antianxiety drugs, vitamin B shots, walking, letting myself be depressed when I need to be, drinking water, watching
Doctor Who
, reading, telling my husband when I need someone to watch me, making a mix tape of songs that make me feel better and not allowing myself to listen to the stuff I want to listen to but that I know will make me worse. I talk to people on Twitter when I'm afraid to be out in the world. When I can't be an active mom, I snuggle with my daughter and watch TV with her or ask her to read to me. I replace the moments when I feel I should be at a PTA meeting with a memory I hope she'll treasure of us hiding under a blanket fort with the cats. I remind myself that depression lies and that I can't trust my own critical judgment when I'm sick. And if things get really bad I call the suicide hotline. I'm not suicidal, but I've called several times before to be talked down from hurting myself. They help. They listen. They've been there. They give advice. They tell you that you aren't crazy. Or, sometimes, they tell you that you are crazy, but in a good way. A way that makes you special.

Okay. What
doesn't
help when you're depressed?

Everyone is different so the best thing you can do is to ask the person you're dealing with what they need.

Like, some people prescribe God for depression or self-harm, and I think that can be really helpful for people who aren't me. Some claim that depression can be “prayed away” or is caused when you don't have enough God in your life. I tried God once but it didn't work well so I cut the dose by a third and just had “Go.”
Go where?
I asked. No one answered. Probably because I didn't have enough God in my life. Someone else told me that capitulating to my depression made me seem ungrateful because Jesus died so that I wouldn't have to suffer, but frankly Jesus seemed to have more than his fair share of bullshit in his life too. That guy got nailed
to death
. I bet people walking past Jesus were like, “Wow. That guy should have had more God in his life.” Or maybe they just sent him those e-mails that say, “Let Go and Let God,” or “God listens to knee-mail.” Probably not though because e-mail wasn't popular yet, but I think that's for the best because there is
nothing
more annoying than having someone tell you that everything would be fine if you were just a better pray-er. Or if you just smiled more, or stopped drinking Diet Coke.

I
can
tell you that “Just cheer up” is almost universally looked at as the most unhelpful depression cure ever. It's pretty much the equivalent of telling someone who just had their legs amputated to “just walk it off.” Some people don't understand that for a lot of us, mental illness is a severe chemical imbalance rather just having “a case of the Mondays.” Those same well-meaning people will tell me that I'm keeping myself from recovering because I really “just need to cheer up and smile.” That's when I consider chopping off their arms and then blaming them for not picking up their severed arms so they can take them to the hospital to get reattached.

“Just pick them up and take them to get fixed.
IT'S NOT THAT HARD, SARAH. I pick up stuff all the time. We all do.
No, I'm not going to help you because you have to learn to do this for yourself. I won't always be around to help you, you know. I'm sure you could do it if you just tried.
Honestly, it's like you don't even
want
to have arms.
”

Granted, it's not a
perfect
analogy because you don't usually lose your arms due to involuntary chemical imbalances. Except that if I cut off your arms because of my mental illness then
technically
a chemical imbalance
did
lead to your arms falling off, so it's dangerous for everyone. I guess my point here is that we
all
suffer when mental illness is not taken seriously.

How do you deal with people who don't understand depression?

Sometimes people say, “How can you feel bad for yourself when people are starving in Greenland?” and I'm like, “I dunno. Talent?” And you can't win because you're given the same guilt when you feel good. “How can you laugh when people are starving in Greenland?” Again,
I don't know
. I don't ask starving people in Greenland how they can laugh when people in Sweden are cancerous and missing hands. (I don't know if that's right about Sweden or Greenland. I don't keep up with geography.) The point is, sometimes shitty things happen, and sometimes they don't. My rule is “Enjoy the non-shitty things now because shitty things are coming.” And vice versa. This is just basic life 101. Your family member is sick. Your dog needs to go out. You find a lump. People tell you to stop eating gluten. That stuff never stops, so go with the flow and don't apologize for starving people. Unless you're the one starving people. Then you should totally apologize.

Right. Apologize if you're starving someone. This is all good stuff.

Right? Oh, I need you to ask me the question on this card because I'm sure it'll be pertinent.

Okay.
This seems fairly unethical, but whatever. “A lot of people have been critical about this book, because of [fill in the blank with whatever people are currently mad at me about]. What's your response?”

That is an
excellent
question.

Well, you wrote it.

Fair enough. But back to the question … First of all, I apologize for that thing I did. It was
incredibly
stupid and I was young and probably drugged. This seems a bit inauthentic since I don't know precisely what you're referring to but I can assure you that there is at least one thing in this book I will think is ridiculously awful within a few years. This is a real issue that I struggle with.

It's tempting to start each sentence with an apology or disclaimer. To preface everything with “In my life I've found” so that people can't yell at me for being wrong (I often am) or misinformed (sure) or overly emotional (HOW
DARE
YOU). But this is a book about my life so I have to simply hope that unsaid disclaimer is just implied. This is my life, and my observations of it, and they change as I change. That's one of the frightening things about writing a book that no one ever tells you. You have to pin down your thoughts and opinions and then they exist on a page, ungrowing,
forever
. You may convince yourself that
you
were never stupid or coarse or ignorant but one day you reread your seventh-grade diary and rediscover the person who one day becomes you, and you vacillate between wanting to hug this unfinished, confused stranger and wanting to shake some damn sense into her. In fact, if you read this book and hated something I wrote, chances are I probably hate it too. Like my grandmother always said, “Your opinions are valid and important. Unless it's some stupid bullshit you're being shitty about, in which case you can just go fuck yourself.”

I'm pretty sure neither of your grandmothers ever said that.

Well, I'm paraphrasing, but still …

Someone once said that if you make something no one hates, no one will ever love it either, and that's true. The same goes for art, writing, and people.
Especially people.
In fact, most of my favorite people are dangerously fucked up but you'd never guess it because we've either become adept at hiding it or we've learned to bare it so honestly that it becomes the new normal. There's a quote from
The Breakfast Club
that goes “We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it.” I have it on a poster but I took a Sharpie to it and scratched out the word “hiding” because it reminds me that there's a certain pride and freedom that comes from wearing your unique bizarreness like a badge of honor.

None of us are immune to feelings of failure. Brené Brown has been my friend for more years than I can count and she's violently successful. She's a Ph.D. who hangs out with Oprah and writes bestselling books about authenticity and vulnerability and being daring. She is the very definition of “having your shit together.” But I know that I can call her up at midnight and say, “I'm super scared that I'm fucking everything up.” And she'll say, “Same here. There's a lot of that going around. What's wrong with us?” Then we'll talk it out and in the end we'll feel better that we both feel shitty because we each respect the other and if we
both
feel like failures then all bets are off and probably
everyone
feels like this. Then I tell Brené that her fear of failure is a good thing because no one can write helpful books about honest emotions if they're already perfect, so technically feeling fucked up is just the first step to her next bestseller. Then she reminds me that my entire livelihood is based on my mortifying myself so if I suddenly got sane I'd become unemployed. She's right. But I'm still afraid that I've written something awful in this book so I've decided that I will
intentionally
make a mistake in here on purpose; just be prepared. And now I can relax because if I fuck something up I can just explain that
that
was my intentional mistake and ten points to you for finding it. Brené says this is a fine idea so technically I think that means I can intentionally fuck shit up
as prescribed by a doctor
.

That's weird. You sound paranoid.

You only think it's weird because you've never accidentally written something offensive. I write intentionally offensive stuff all the time and I'm prepared to take the heat on that, but I'm always afraid of writing or saying something that I have no clue is awful. (Like, one time I wrote that a friend had welched on a bet and spell-check was like, “That's not a word. Did you mean to say ‘Welsh'?” and I was all, “
Jesus, spell-check.
That's a bit racist, isn't it? I write about someone not paying their debt and you're all, ‘
I bet it was the Welsh.
' Sort yourself out, spell-check.” So then I looked it up online and read that the suspected origin of the phrase “welch on a bet” is an offensive disparagement “on account of the alleged dishonesty of the Welsh.” I didn't even know that was a thing. It's like when little kids would say, “My sister got a bigger piece of pie so now I feel gypped.” When I got older I found out “gyp” is a derogatory term for “Gypsy” so I nipped that in the bud. But the best replacement the dictionary offered was “flimflam” and it just sounds ridiculous to say, “Your dessert is bigger. I feel flimflammed.” No one is taking that complaint seriously. Instead I just end up feeling bitter about pie and saying nothing. And also now I'm worried that the word “flimflam” is somehow offensive to the Flemish.

You've overthought this.

Well, I have an anxiety disorder.
This is what it's like in my head all the time.

I'm also worried that writing about struggling with my weight is going to piss people off because society is
already
overly focused on appearance and I'm not helping by talking about how I feel fat sometimes. And I also worry that I might get skinny accidentally and then people who see me on tour will be pissed because they won't realize that my weight fluctuates by sixty pounds depending on how sick, tired, or depressed I am. And I'll have to carry around unflattering pictures of me as evidence and bring affidavits from my doctor who continually tells me I need to lose weight until I get incredibly sick or too depressed to eat for a week and then he's like, “You look great! But why are you in the ER again?”